December is oppressively cold in Nebraska. It’s a deep, jagged cold that goes beyond discomfort; it is painful. Once the ground freezes — and it will — the land is hard as concrete.
So for the second straight winter, Landmand Golf Course sleeps, literally frozen in time. A year ago, shaping stopped in December when the ground froze. Today, shaping is complete and the course has begun its grow-in. But grass doesn’t grow in Nebraska in December. Landmand’s development has paused, then, until spring drives away the brutal cold, and the site can be awakened to continue its growth. The course likely will open for play in 2022.
Rob Collins, half of the design duo King Collins, walks down to Landmand’s second green.
Amidst the long shadows cast by the low-hanging, late autumn sun walk Rob Collins and Tad King, Landmand’s creators. In 2014, their budding design firm, King Collins, unveiled the most improbable golf course of the Twenty-First Century: Sweetens Cove, a rollicking nine-hole course in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, with wide fairways, surreal green contours, and breathtaking bunkering, all jam-packed into a miniscule 72 acres — more reminiscent of the Old Course or Pinehurst No. 2 than parkland golf’s usual offerings. Its early cult following has swelled into the mainstream: Golf Magazine recently ranked Sweetens Cove the seventh-best nine-hole course in the world; in 2019, Golfweek dubbed it America’s 49th-best modern golf course of any size.
At Landmand — King Collins’ first 18-hole design — any temptation to assume it as Sweetens Cove’s sequel is cast aside like dust in the unceasing Nebraska wind. Sweetens Cove sits in a floodplain, renovated on top of an unremarkable, dead-flat 1950s design. Landmand could not be more different in size, shape, and scale.
Even without grass and through untrained eyes, Landmand is staggering. From its highest points, views stretch miles across an enormous landscape of hills, cornfields, and the Missouri River. Fairways sprawl nearly 100 yards wide, rolling over and around huge slopes like a biblical torrent. Bunkers of every size and shape dot the landscape, from tidy pot bunkers to gigantic caverns that seem torn out of the Earth by some massive claw. Frequently, the greens defy belief, both in size and shape (“Wait until you see this flash face on the back of the 10th green,” Collins says over dinner. “It’s” — he gets out of his chair and hurries to a nearby restaurant window, standing on his toes and reaching toward the top of a windowpane eight feet high — “it’s at least this tall.”). If Sweetens Cove was a canvas, then Landmand is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
There is nothing like it anywhere in America, or maybe anywhere else. Even Cruden Bay in Scotland — whose lauded design plays through dunes 60 feet tall — seems undersized in comparison. On the shores of the North Sea, Cruden Bay feels like the edge of the world; Landmand feels like the top of it.
Ironic, then, that Landmand owes its existence to being on bottom.
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Railroad ties hold together bunkering at the first hole.
Nebraska, as human beings know it, was born in the cold. Millions of years ago, it was unrecognizable: covered by a large inland sea, and later by swamps and rivers.
Then, about two million years ago, came the glaciers — the size and impact of which is nearly impossible to exaggerate. Like the hand of God, they changed everything they touched: the land, the temperature, the ecology, everything. The Keewatin ice sheet alone covered half of North America, from Baffin Bay (which separates Canada from Greenland) in the north to Nebraska in the south, covering this place in ice hundreds of feet thick. As it gradually slid across the land, the sheet pulverized everything beneath like a god-sized strip of sandpaper; by the time the ice receded, the rocks beneath had been ground into powder: loess. It blew across the eastern United States and piled up into hills and bluffs, sometimes hundreds of feet high, reaching as far south at Mississippi.
Loess is a curious sediment: fine like silt, but sticky. “It’s one of the only soils in the world that will stand up perfectly vertical without collapsing,” said King, the duo’s construction guru. Here in northeast Nebraska, on the edge of the Missouri River (which likewise owes its existence to the glaciers), the loess built shapes seen almost nowhere else in this famously flat state — or anywhere else in America, for that matter. The hills reached hundreds of feet in the air, then stuck together long enough for grass to cover and protect them from being scattered across the river.
About 11,000 years later, Will Andersen’s family moved in.
Staring back toward Landmand’s first fairway from No. 1 green.
Andersen, an accomplished player (he qualified for the 2015 U.S. Mid-Amateur and won the Prairie Dunes club championship in 2017), had dreamed for years of turning this land into a golf course. As a younger man, he even routed a course on the site. Nothing ever came of it, but neither did the land fall into the Andersen family’s farming operation; the land was too severe, and the topsoil too thin. So it sat unoccupied and unused.
Finally, around 2018, Andersen started contacting golf architects with an eye toward a real design. David McLay Kidd, Tom Fazio, Tiger Woods, and others all passed. Finally, Andersen e-mailed Collins and King; they showed up about two weeks later.
One of the reasons King and Collins work together so well is their differing personalities: Collins’ imagination meshes with King’s pragmatism. It is not unusual for them to look at something and see two different things. But when they first saw Landmand, they immediately agreed: it was the site they’d been waiting for since Sweetens Cove.
The course practically routed itself. “Everything we pointed the rangefinder at turned into a great hole,” Collins said. “We knew where the first tee was gonna be, so we looked over and said, ‘What if we played across that awesome valley?’ Boom, great opening par-5. Then we said, ‘OK, that hill looks cool. What if we played over that?’ Boom, great short par-4. It just kept coming together like that.”
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It would be tempting to dub Landmand an 18-hole Sweetens Cove, or a Sweetens Cove on more dramatic land. But that’s not true. Landmand spans both sides of the spectrum: it is alternately more dramatic, and more subtle than Sweetens. At times, its scale reaches levels that Sweetens never could, simply because of the constrained footprint on which Collins and King worked in Tennessee (Sweetens Cove sits on 72 acres; Landmand sprawls across more than 500). Elsewhere, though, Landmand is more restrained, with tamer putting surfaces to welcome players for surviving the rollercoaster from tee to green; “We can’t just build 18 Sweetens greens out here,” Collins confided in King early in the build. King agreed.
Landmand’s scale is more than just a physical obstacle, though. It is a mental burden. In a place where everything is bigger, players inevitably feel smaller, and hazards look more invincible — even when they’re not. From Landmand’s first tee, with the massive course spread before you, the bunkers sitting in the crook of the fairway’s rightward bend seem 350 yards away; but rangefinders don’t lie, and show the traps a mere 240 yards from the back tees. The enormity of the setting plays tricks with the eye; intimidation takes care of the rest. “No. 1 at Sand Hills is one of my favorite opening holes and one of my favorite par-5s in the world,” Collins said. “I love golf courses that open with par-5s. And when we laid out that hole for the first time, I was like, ‘Man, this is a great opportunity to build a fun, strategic, bold opening-statement hole.’”
The gaping greenside bunker at Landmand’s 15th hole.
But there is balance, too. From the back tees, Landmand stretches nearly 7,100 yards, but four of its par-4s measure 360 yards or less; the par-3s range from 250 yards down to just 110 yards. Some of its greens are huge and radical (the 17th hole’s replica of Alister MacKenzie’s lost Sitwell green sprawls over 35,000 square feet, and offers dozens of possible pins); but most are subtle and sit neatly on the ground, reminiscent of Pine Needles. Through it all, no two holes are alike. “We wanted variety — holes in the valleys, holes on ridges,” King said. “You can say what you want about this place, but you can’t say it’s repetitive. It’s not the same shit over and over.”
And then there is the cruel wind. There is always wind. It pours down the Rocky Mountains to the west, toppling down peaks 14,000 feet high, careening over faces of ice and rock, before crashing into the prairie; with no trees to break its rush, it races across hundreds of miles of grassland, biting into landforms and the wincing faces that suffer winters here — but none more than those standing atop Landmand’s eighth. At 110 yards and downhill, the wind determines everything about the shot — including whether a putt off the tee is the wisest decision.
Landmand’s constant wind is the final vindication of Collins’ and Kings’ design. If scale is a measurement of how well a golf course fits into its surroundings, then Landmand always needed to be big to fit into its massive setting; otherwise, among its enormous loess hills, the course would have looked puny. And even the best players would have had difficulty keeping their drives on narrow, sloping fairways in this unyielding wind; Landmand’s width is fundamental to its playability.
Landmand’s size, then, is not superfluous; it is necessary.
The scale of Landmand’s playing corridors will get the headlines, but the real star of the show could be the course’s elaborate — and occasionally gargantuan — bunkering.
In that light, Landmand is a manifesto — an epistle for architectural “maximalism,” just as Sand Hills evangelized for minimalism a generation ago. At Sand Hills, minimalism demonstrated that natural features shaped over thousands of years inherently show more nuance and uniqueness than anything a bulldozer could carve, and that the best designs leave those features in place. And Landmand proves that isn’t always true. It rejects minimalism for minimalism’s sake; King and Collins softened features because they had to; they moved dirt because they had to. The designers neither constrained themselves with ideology nor indulged themselves in gratuitousness; the result is radically pragmatic.
The design still is dramatic (there is a difference, after all, between taming unplayable features and destroying them), but Collins rejects the idea that Landmand was fundamentally too severe a site for golf.
“Too severe? What about the 17th hole at the Old Course? You hit over a fucking hotel, and the green’s about three feet wide, and there’s a road behind it. It’s the best par-4 in the world,” Collins said. “Some of the best golf courses in the world ask engaging, difficult, unique questions. Purely as an art form, wouldn’t golf get rather boring if every single person was just trying to do the same thing over and over? Golf needs to have its boundaries pushed a little.”
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One afternoon in July 2018, Collins tweeted two uncommon things. First, he publicly lobbied for King Collins to design the at-the-time-unannounced third course at Sand Valley in Wisconsin. Second, he offered to return his firm’s design fee if a King Collins course didn’t become the resort’s highest-rated course (Sand Valley’s existing 18-hole courses are products of Coore and Crenshaw and David McLay Kidd).
Early grow-in at Landmand’s first fairway.
Collins never got the chance to make good on his guarantee; the job ultimately went to Tom Doak. But Collins’ tweet proved that rankings — though arbitrary — are not inconsequential. To architects, developers, and many players, golf course rankings matter. Which is to say that Collins thinks a lot about how Landmand will be received. And he thinks about every detail under his control until the day the first reviews land. Walking along the sixth fairway, he points to a ridge; “This just needs to be accentuated,” he mentions to King. Hours later, standing on the 18th green, with the setting sun dipping toward the first green, the fairway begins showing its ripples. Landmand is enormous, but its details are precise. And that’s no accident; it’s because King and Collins obsessed over them.
There’s the double fairway at No. 3, split by a centerline barranca; the wild sixth green, difficult to access from a bailout off the tee but open to a simple pitch from an aggressive drive; the 12th tee, from which a dozen of Landmand’s holes are visible (“From our first visit, we always knew we had to get out here, to get this par-3,” Collins said); the 14th hole’s 245-yard Redan; the 18th hole’s otherworldly “milk carton” bunker, with a huge tuft of sand standing nine feet tall.
“I go through the holes multiple times a day, over and over,” Collins said. “I think about all the shots. I think it’s unassailable. There’s absolutely no doubt that every green out there does what it needs to do.”
Late autumn on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River.
There is still work to do at Landmand; shaping has ended, but when the ground thaws in the spring, King says some finishing work will need to be done. Only one fairway has been grassed so far, so the rest of the course must grow in — and Andersen, of a farming family, says that grass grows best in Nebraska in autumn, after spring and summer have warmed the ground. Some holes might open for play in 2021, but a full grow-in almost certainly moves opening day to mid-2022.
When that day comes, it seems inevitable that Landmand will be divisive. Tobacco Road was; Sweetens Cove still is; Alister Mackenzie famously panicked when Cypress Point received unanimously positive reviews. But if the likes of Streamsong Black and Mammoth Dunes are among America’s top 25 public golf courses, then it seems impossible that Landmand will not challenge the top 10. It is a statement: an emphatic shared vision for something new, as was Sand Hills. None of its 18 holes takes a moment off; and together, they constantly present new questions and challenges for the player to confront. For many players, it will be uncomfortable. That is the point.
“There’s a swashbuckling, cowboy side to golf,” Collins said. “It’s a fucking game. As long as it’s playable and good shots are rewarded, what else matters?”
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